37 Posts from August 2003

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MERLOT Keynote: Leading from Both Ends

Gerry Hanely, head MERLOT “wine steward”- said a theme was “connecting learning repositories”. Interesting, eh? Can you think of an acronym that fits there? It begins with an R….

Keynote: “Leading from Both Ends”- Doug MacLeod from Netcetera to talk about eduSourceCanada. Introduced “Donut Object Repositories” Tim Horton’s- a chain of thousands of franchises across Canada.

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MERLOT: Customs or UPS Ate My Poster

My decision to send my poster materials to the MERLOT conference by “express” shipping looks shaky. Apparently, my “packages” were held at customs for extra taxes, my office authorizied, and who knows where they are right now. C’est la vie.

So for now, my Maricopa Learning eXchange poster is very transparent, or totally virtual. This is no way to run a warehouse 😉

Certainly not the end of the earth. Anyhow, the hotel is brimming with name tagged persons, people glancing at name tags, the usual conference shmoozing etc. Opening reception is up at the 34th floor, and tomorrow the MERLOT flows. Bring it on. There is meta data in the air.

Keep on scrolling/clicking to see some photos.

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The Phoenix Has Landed at MERLOT

Unlike D’Arcy, my trip to Vancouver, British Columbia, was less than smooth. It rained in Florida, so my flight from Phoenix was late, customs was slow, and the bus stopped at every freaking hotel in downtown. Finally arrived at 2:00 am, cannot h-a-r-d-l-y t-y-p-e (no more than usual). It is blessedly cool here (They call […]

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Amazon RSS Feed-Builder

Although Boris recently blogged on a convoluted way to get RSS feeds from Amazon.com, there is a slicker interface from onfocus , the Amazon RSS Feed Builder. This site is by “pb” or Paul Bausch, “co-developer” of Blogger and author of Amazon Hacks, so definitely no slouch at the programming command line. It is the […]

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Games for Learning, What a Concept

Both Stephen and George recently pointed to this bit from Wired News: Educators Turn to Games for Help.

What an idea! … wait a minute, we took a look at Shall We Teach with a Game? back in 1994 at that time, with having our faculty review a selection of CD-ROM games for potential in new learning environments.

It is good to see that MIT has caught up with our work 😉 But no, we are not crowing for “we did it first credit”, but more to look at the power of small innovations that use existing content rather than big ticket projects that create glitzy, commercial game level apps.

We have had some internal discussions in our our organization about a (real? perceived?) notion that our system’s reputation for innovation has lost its luster.

So a question is, when people think of innovation, it it only the big money projects from MIT, Microsoft, etc?

Blarney.